Which Sciences are Real and which are Quackery?

[Iron Jaguar]

Anything predicated on the Earth being millions of years old and humans evolving from apes is pure fraud and lies.

 

[Screamer_2]

The social sciences is where there's a fuck tonne of bullshittery. The problem we are now having is that they have now gotten a fuck tonne of power in the institutions they're now encroaching on actual sciences. Pushing them to alter their results and methodology to align with the bullshit.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

well the education industry has sold lemmings on the concept that "degree = expertise or knowledge"

of course this paradigm started collapsing when people my age (im mid 30s) started entering the workforce and going to college and we started seeing retards get degrees. it became apparant that a degree pretty much means you just have money.

i have two degrees, i didnt get them by working hard or being particularly smart...college was barely even a test, you got high grades if you just do what they wanna hear. i didnt even do that, i did a couple anti SJW papers and still passed

a degree doesnt make you smart or mean you know what youre talking about

i personally stopped taking Tyson seriously when he said God wasnt real and then said he had never done any psychadelics of any kind. thats not very adherent to the concepts of experimentation and the scientific method

I tried to induce an entheogenic experience with high concentrations of THC (it sounds like a joke but it can do that) and all it did was show me lattice tunnels and rapidly flashing Fleischer-style cartoons.

 

[Otoya Yamaguchi]

I tried to induce an entheogenic experience with high concentrations of THC (it sounds like a joke but it can do that) and all it did was show me lattice tunnels and rapidly flashing Fleischer-style cartoons.

of course not everyone is going t have a religious experience...

BUT at the very least, it should show you that reality is not as simple as whats in front of your face, whether that be a normally blocked part of your mind or whatever.

 

[Chuck McGill]

As a general rule, the more math your field requires the more I trust it as a real science. In particular I consider social sciences to be especially suspect, since a lot of them operate off of surveys where people self-report, which I consider to be only slightly more reliable than reading tea leaves. You commonly hear unmarried women citing studies that unmarried childless women are ACKSUALLY happier, and I'm always inclined to wonder how you would even begin going about proving this.

Of course, I'm starting to realize that the hard sciences are not without their fuckery, especially after the vack-seens.

 

[97 toyota corolla]

From all our observations of the natural world we very strongly believe that it follows predictable rules which can be explained, predicted and so to modelled. So we can use math to model physical phenomena and thus we can use math to predict them.
The problem comes in that the natural world is somewhat complicated, this means that we often lack data and our models need refining as we learn more about the natural world. So it gets all to easy to dismiss science because people think it should provide unchanging answers to our questions and not simply be a method of discovery.

Another problem is that the sheer complexity of some aspects of the natural world makes it very difficult to easily comprehend it, especially if you're a layman in any particular area. The human brain likes simple explanations because the human mind was (if by God or evolution, your choice but either way) not really made to operate in certain realms and thus comprehend certain aspects of the natural world. So it's very often the case that people will dismiss something out of hand because they don't understand it or because it seems counter intuitive to what the limited human meat brain thinks it should.
This is a bit sad though, the opposite of the "trust the science" even though the lives we live now very much is the product of magical maths and strange models which very few really understand.

That's a very good point you've made. This is definitely a thinking pattern I've been gravitating towards, which is why I made this thread. This is not to say that I don't have respect and admiration for the hundreds of years of innovations; but that it's hard to parse through scientific conclusions that are based on legitimate observations of the natural world, and those that are more dogmatic but obfuscated with consensus.

I can get into an example that's a common discussion but illustrates my point: Evolutionist vs Creationist. I've shifted over the years pretty firmly towards the Creationist argument, not just because it falls in line with my religious beliefs, but because on its face its an explanation that does have legitimate arguments to back up its claim. It seems to me what the sticking point is between the two camps is that the observations of nature are the same, but the conclusions and assumptions one comes to from those observations are very different. And what it looks like to me is less that Evolutionists are the impartial "lead by the facts" type that they put on, but that they've already accepted all the assumptions and conclusions that come with their side and end up with convoluted and almost-esoteric answers to whatever is inconvenient for their theory. It's very much a sunk-cost mindset, where as a whole nobody wants to throw out 200 years worth of work to have a coherent answer to questions like "Why do we not see gradual changes between species represented in the fossil record" and "How can you assume that mutations can culminate into forming complex systems through natural selection, when most mutations we observe in nature just lead to death instead of an advantage"; instead apologists will just call you stupid for making such a "basic" argument that has been "debunked" and give an explanation that doesn't actually answer the initial question.

And it's not like those who argue from the intelligent design/creationist perspective are all country bumpkins with no qualifications, but often there is this intellectual pressure in academia to conform with accepted dogma and twist whatever new discoveries come through to fit into their narrative, and that exact dynamic is what bothers me so much.

I can explain myself further, but I hope what I'm saying makes some amount of sense.

 

[Reticulan Joe]

Anything that calls itself science, isn’t:
Political science
Computer science
Creation science
Social science
Materials science

I can say this confidently as someone with a background in computer science. My whole field is half math autism and half electrical engineering, with a side helping of received programming lore that’s on the level of rigor of medieval herbology.

 

[Sparkling Yuzu]

For me, I tend to stick to sources from before the 21st century. Hard sciences from back then are pretty much safe.

The Pissmaster plane, better than the modern aeroplane!

 

[Skitarii]

Fake sciences: evolution and vaccinology

 

[Drael]

Outliers exist but there's probably more truth to physiognomy than some people want to admit.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

As a general rule, the more math your field requires the more I trust it as a real science. In particular I consider social sciences to be especially suspect, since a lot of them operate off of surveys where people self-report, which I consider to be only slightly more reliable than reading tea leaves. You commonly hear unmarried women citing studies that unmarried childless women are ACKSUALLY happier, and I'm always inclined to wonder how you would even begin going about proving this.

Of course, I'm starting to realize that the hard sciences are not without their fuckery, especially after the vack-seens.

View attachment 5641163

Broke: Everything I can't measure is just DARK matter
Woke: Stars are conscious living creatures that roam the universe devouring each other

http://www.gregmatloff.com/Edge%20Science%20Matloff-ES29.pdf

 

[Ralph from Chicago]

Political Science is a fraud and retards so many lanyard class young people. Travel to DC and you'll see that the federal government is just a bunch of young overly educated staffers telling those in elected office how to vote on things.

 

[Audit]

Science, at its core essence, can be broken down into two primary fields.

Real science: The projects I propose that got grant funding.

Fake science: The projects I propose that didn't get grant funding or articles written by peers I dislike.

 

[Jarch6]

All the scientific fields have some bullshit, even the "hard" sciences. With that said, the hard sciences tend to have significantly less nonsense than the soft sciences, but one must keep in mind that there are still glimmers of truth in the latter. The ones that come to mind that are surprisingly bad are psychology, economics, anthropology, and anything involving medical research. There are others that are much worse (e.g., gender studies, sociology, or political science) but they're jokes prima facie and only the biggest of rubes would ever bother granting the benefit of the doubt to their findings.

Outliers exist but there's probably more truth to physiognomy than some people want to admit.

Physiognomy is obviously true, the notion that one's appearance is completely unrelated to their other characteristics is absurd. Debunking some schmuck's view of phrenology or physiognomy obviously doesn't suffice to disprove such a notion altogether, anyone with even a fledgling's understanding of the philosophy of science could tell you that. Still, whenever someone publishes a paper showing that ML can predict differences in political opinion or homosexuality based on subtle facial differences a bunch of idiots in the comments gawk and regurgitate, "physgionomy was deboonked! my teacha tol me so!!!"

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

From life experience I can say Astronomy, Paleontology, Geology, physics, and planetary science are mostly real.

Social science is nothing but political propaganda.

 

[instant]

If you just stop for a second and think about it, isnt it crazy how many research is published daily?

Let's take an "expert". To become an expert, in any field, you are guaranteed to have had to publish at least 2 studies. Then, if you wanna maintain your credentials, a tenured professor would have to constantly be in the middle of publishing a study to keep their tenure, with only minimal financial support from the university. Meanwhile, a research company, if they're commercial then they have to constantly be at the mercy of their client's biased motives, whereas public reaearch means they're at the mercy of the government's biased motives. Either way, that's a guarantee of at least 2 publications a year, with the expectation of them being not very meaningful due to resources or invested parties limiting the scope.

Now circling back to the thread topic. Rather than just pointing out how there are a bunch of quack science fields, isnt it much crazier how the current research industry (yes its basically an industry at this point) necessitates the continued creation of meaningless research?

Furthermore, for almost all quack sciences, are they not all tied back to having their justification to exist in the first place to some kind of obviously half assed publication?

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I think "quackery" vs. "real" is too broad a topic. Outside of stuff like astrology and numerology, real science is real.

The problem is so much of that has so much room for so much bullshit. An easy way to tell is "how much money was involved in this and who profits". Stuff most heavily affected includes medical science (and nutrition), stuff involving weather and climate, anthropology, stuff involving space, and so on.

 

[Sugriva]

The only "science" I trust is hitting things with a big stick

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Anything that requires "trusting the science" is not science but a faith based religion.

There's a difference between science, and "scientism" or science as a religion with "experts" being treated as prophets or clergy.

 

[Crypto Six Gorillionaire]

If you just stop for a second and think about it, isnt it crazy how many research is published daily?

Either way, that's a guarantee of at least 2 publications a year, with the expectation of them being not very meaningful due to resources or invested parties limiting the scope.

Now circling back to the thread topic. Rather than just pointing out how there are a bunch of quack science fields, isnt it much crazier how the current research industry (yes its basically an industry at this point) necessitates the continued creation of meaningless research?

Furthermore, for almost all quack sciences, are they not all tied back to having their justification to exist in the first place to some kind of obviously half assed publication?

Isn't it wild how a few publication companies control what becomes 'truth'?

Fuck the constant demand for publications, it's what drove me to get a normal job after my PhD.